Released February 11th, 2010
Engaging with your clients and community through the Social Web is powerful and necessary. On February 11th, two of our team members, Annastasia Webster, Business Analyst and Jim Cook, VP of Interactive Strategy and Services partnered with The Center for Nonprofit Excellence (CNPE) to discuss the Social Web.
This introductory course was intimate and collaborative. The attendees learned about the different aspects of the Social Web and how to apply them to their nonprofit organization. The Social Web is not a fad. Our goal for this course was to help our partners navigate through this intricate and forever changing space.
We will continue to partner with CNPE to offer courses that will dive further into specific types of Social Media.
http://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/calendar/
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Released October 30th, 2009
It has been a busy few years. The Mission Data team has grown by 50% and our revenue has increased by 20% each year. Focusing on strategic partnerships has been instrumental in growing our business.
In an interview by Business First, Stuart Gavurin, CEO of Mission Data, spoke to our talent and our offerings.
Read the full Business First article.
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Released September 24th, 2009
Mission Data recently designed and developed the new Kentucky Association of Realtors (KAR) website, check it out: www.kar.com! We had a blast working with the KAR team and collaborating on a website that would work well for them, their membership and their visitors.
Our work with KAR led to a request for Mission Data to present at their annual convention and expo. Todd Budnikas, Creative Director for Mission Data and Marvin Chartoff, VP of Managed Services gave a talk about Website Trends and Design Strategies. We were honored to have the opportunity to speak to realtors about strategies they can use to attract more business and influence their existing clients. Realtors are in a competitive space, the use of the web, social media and mobile devices is critical to conducting and attracting business.
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Tagged: Design presentation strategy
Released September 16th, 2009
One of the frustrating behaviors of dd is that it provides no feedback about what it is doing. It does however provide a signal (USR1) that you can send to the process that will dump the current progress. Open a new terminal (I use screen) and type:
while true; do kill -USR1 `pidof dd`; sleep 2; done
(NOTE: if `pidof dd` doesn’t work for you, just use the process id directly)
Switch back to the terminal where dd is running and you should see:
9902751744 bytes (9.9 GB) copied, 732.883 s, 13.5 MB/s
9469+0 records in
9468+0 records out
9927917568 bytes (9.9 GB) copied, 734.914 s, 13.5 MB/s
9496+0 records in
9495+0 records out
9956229120 bytes (10 GB) copied, 736.941 s, 13.5 MB/s
updating every couple of seconds.
Posted in System Administration | No Comments »
Tagged: linux System Administration
Released August 19th, 2009
Mission Data has been selected as a winner of the 2009 Alfred P. Sloan Awards for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility in the greater Louisville area!
This prestigious award recognizes employers that are successfully using workplace flexibility to meet both employer and employee goals. As a winner, Mission Data ranks in the top 20% — the 80th percentile — of employers nationally in terms of flexible work programs, policies and culture.
The Alfred P. Sloan Awards for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility are part of the When Work Works project, an ongoing initiative of Families and Work Institute, the Institute for a Competitive Workforce (an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), and the Twiga Foundation. Through When Work Works, these partner organizations provide research, resources, and recognition to employers nationwide. The project shares the results of research on creating effective and flexible workplaces that meet the needs of the 21st century.
We are honored to receive this award. Workplace flexibility is an integral part of our business practices.
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Released February 12th, 2008
Treetop was one of the more exciting projects I saw at last year’s RubyConf. Nathan Sobo’s Treetop talk is available online and I urge you to watch it. Nathan did a great job of explaining the basics of syntactic analysis, and then got into the specifics of using Treetop’s implementation of parsing expression grammars to put the concepts to work.
Treetop appeared to gather all the concepts together into an understandable domain specific language. All of the tokenization and node structure can go into a single file, and the interactive nature of Ruby makes for the perfect sand box. I felt like I could get somewhere if I invested just an hour into this. I was happy to find that my impressions were correct.
After a short time I had caught on enough to start writing my own code. Once over the hump the rest was easy. I was able to write and test a Treetop grammar for parsing CSV files within a few hours. I chose CSV parsing because I was already familiar with the format, and I could compare my implementation to not just one but two existing Ruby libraries.
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Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
Tagged: ruby
Released January 30th, 2008
Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks via SSH on remote servers. It has many uses, I (and many others) use it to deploy their (rails) applications. The best I can tell there is no built in way to deploy a branch from your source code control system. There are a couple ways of accomplishing this. I chose passing in the branch as a parameter to the Capistrano command:
cap --set-before branch=testbranch deploy
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Posted in System Administration | No Comments »
Tagged: ruby System Administration
Released January 11th, 2008
Ajax can bring a much more responsive and intuitive feel to web applications. However, many times developers overlook error cases when using Ajax. What if the request fails? In one particular case a user’s session may have timed out before they made an Ajax call. This post describes one such way of handling this in a somewhat friendly way.
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Posted in Web Development | 1 Comment »
Tagged: ajax java javascript
Released April 26th, 2007
A client site still uses cvs, the ever trusty version control system. After what seemed a run of the mill merge I noticed this:
C lib/jt400_3_3.jar
cvs update: move away lib/jt400_3_3.jar; it is in the way
Very peculiar. That file hadn’t changed on the branch. I googled around and an explanation started to come together.
First, from the always excellent Roedy Green’s Java & Internet Glossary on Mindprod:
CVS is disturbed by the appearance of repository files it did not put there. Your best bet is simply to delete the entire directory containing the offending file by hand, and re checkout or reupdate the directory to build the necessary entries. Then you can add the files safely.
Then, I found this mailing list post:
This means the file that CVS wants to checkout exists on the local machine but CVS never created the file in the past. This it isn’t CVS’s file and it complains rather than blindly overwriting.
The solution everywhere was the same: just blow away the directory and check it out again. Worked for me. Now I need to puzzle out how it happened in the first place…
Posted in System Administration | 2 Comments »
Tagged: CVS System Administration Utilities
Released April 22nd, 2007
If you have a model that uses set_table_name you may hit a snag when trying to use fixtures and unit tests. The solution is twofold: name the fixture file using the legacy table name, and use the set_fixture_class method in your unit test. I coudn’t find this method mentioned in Agile Web Development with Rails, and there’s only a brief mention on the rubyonrails.com site. Still, some web searches turned up the answers.
Here is a simple example:
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Posted in Systems Integration | 2 Comments »
Tagged: rails ruby